Rebuilding the ARC: America’s Largest Collection of Popular Music Launches GoFundMe Campaign

The day the music died is a lie. Music never dies. It’s the one thing our minds protect at all costs. If only our wallets were so loyal. Now they have a chance to be: This week, the largest popular music collection in America (3 million recordings!) is, for the first time, asking the public for financial help. Is New York’s legacy as a music town worth $100,000? That’s the question the Archive of Contemporary Music is asking.

The Archive is a massive private research library that has been in downtown Manhattan since 1985, when Bob George balked at the price of rent in SoHo — $100 a month — and instead took over a $65 a month space in what would become TriBeCa, where bums burned wood in 50-gallon drums. “It had no walls, no ceiling, no floors, no electricity, nothing,” he tells Rolling Stone. “We built it ourselves. We made this place with our own determination.”

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For the first time in a generation, the archive is now asking the public for help: On Monday, it launched a $100,000 GoFundMe (supported by a $50,000 dollar-for-dollar matching grant from the Jaharis Family Foundation). The money aims to avoid eviction by paying $90,000 in owed rent that the archive has built up since its rent jumped in 2016 from about $10,000 a month to $21,000 a month, George says. “What’s crazy,” he adds, “is that it’s still a deal; well below market value. But the city has become a place where even deals are unaffordable.”

Gary Price (gprice@mediasourceinc.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area. Before launching INFOdocket, Price and Shirl Kennedy were the founders and senior editors at ResourceShelf and DocuTicker for 10 years. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com, and is currently a contributing editor at Search Engine Land.